Lucky for him, Cyril the kitten passed the cell phone test Friday in San Francisco.

It was a close call. The life-or-death drama was played out at Macy's department store, where the San Francisco SPCA had set up its annual Christmas display windows full of cute, adoptable kittens and puppies.

Cyril, with a deft routine of tail chasing, had caught the eye and won the heart of a passing Christmas shopper named Mystie Rodriguez. But under SPCA rules, Rodriguez would not be allowed to bring Cyril home unless her boyfriend, Joe, agreed to the adoption, too.

But Joe couldn't get time off from work to come check Cyril out. And the SPCA, unlike Macy's, cannot put its goods on layaway.

Fortunately, Rodriguez's cell phone has a camera. She snapped a picture of Cyril, then called Joe and transmitted the kitten's photo. Standing by the cosmetics counter, she pleaded the case for Cyril over the cell phone. At first, Joe was reluctant.

"Go on, look at the picture," Rodriguez said. "Whaddya think?"

Joe said he would have to mull it over. Rodriguez knew her man, however, and kept up the campaign.

Before such a relentless assault, the unseen Joe withered. OK, he said. The paperwork was filled out, the $100 adoption fee ponied up, and Cyril headed to his new home in a cardboard box.

Cyril was one of 15 kittens that the SPCA installed in the O'Farrell Street display windows, on a rotating basis. The windows were elaborately decorated scenes made to look like the interiors of fancy railroad train cars, and the kittens were jumping, nipping, licking, scratching and nuzzling at a frenetic pace. It was left to veteran SPCA volunteer Rick Holdreth to decide the key matter of when a kitty's time in the windows was up.

"It's a judgment call," Holdreth said. "You want them to be playing or doing something cute. They can be sleeping, if they're sleeping in a cute fashion. But you don't want them to be hiding. That means they're stressed out. "

Emilio and Augustus were hiding in a corner. Out they came, and back into their cages in the back of the store. In went Flip and Fly. Within minutes, Flip and Fly got adopted. Out they came, and in went Manna and Marquis.

The SPCA knows that animals, unlike many department store items, should not be impulse purchases. That's why prospective kitten owners must fill out a two-page application, answer a lengthy SPCA grilling in a small, stuffy storeroom, pay the $100 fee and promise to be very, very responsible.

The questions are not for the faint-hearted.

How much time a day do you plan to spend with the cat? Have you ever lived with cats? Have you ever had a cat that did not use the litter box? How did you handle it? Do you object to our visiting your home in the future?

Pedro Alvarez, who fell in love with Manna and Marquis, decided it would be unfair to take one kitten without the other, so he took both. His beloved cat had died two weeks ago of old age, and he thought he was all through with cats for a while, but then he passed the Macy's window.

"I had to do it," he said. "I'm a cat lover. Cats do their own thing. You don't have to walk them. They go potty by themselves. I knew I had to have more cats."